A hundred times a day.

[hannah]

I like having privacy. I like having it from my family. I like keeping things to myself out of a sense of protectiveness towards those things, and to avoid conversations I can't ever convince myself are anything but insincere and indulgent, and because it feels like keeping things private is one of the few things I can have control over and exert some autonomy. Like a couple weeks ago when I went to DC without telling my family. My dad was more hurt by my being noncommittal when the subject of the weekend came up more than my leaving itself, but the point stands. But now I'm thinking: how do I compromise that.

One of the reasons I left without telling anyone beforehand was how hurt I was at the birthday dinner, and another one was that my brothers will jet off somewhere - Philadelphia, Buffalo - without any advance notice to anyone else. It's got me thinking about setting the precedent of saying I won't be attending Friday night dinner at least a week in advance without saying why, as a method to remind myself I don't have to share what I don't want to talk about and to hold it over them I'm much more thoughtful about it than they are. There's some spite involved in this, too. I can't deny that. But maybe it's a healthier version of it.

Comments

[petra]

If you want to teach them a lesson, think very carefully about what lesson you are teaching. They almost certainly won't feel any moral injury from your failure to communicate your plans, the way it irks you when they don't communicate theirs, because if it bothered them, they'd damn well communicate.

You don't have to share anything you don't want to, but -- to pull from Wendell Berry and argue with him for a moment -- the poet wrote, "I come into the peace of wild things / who do not tax their lives with forethought / of grief."

But those wild things also don't get the joy of being recommended a loved one's favorite place to go on a vacation they're taking in a month -- it might be truly the best meal ever, but you have to have reservations.

Or, to put it another way, every time you offer your family a bid for connection, they can say yes to you. If you offer them fewer opportunities to connect going forward, you will connect with them less frequently than you do now, because they won't always say yes.